Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  At the hospital they inserted a catheter into her groin, feeding the tube through the femoral vein into the heart. A pacemaker was attached to the end of the catheter. It sent an electronic signal, forcing the heart to skip a beat. The heart of a patient with Brugada syndrome cannot handle this stress. If the heart stops beating, it means Brugada is present. Elsa’s heart stopped. Less than two seconds later they defibrillated her.

  “What was it like to be dead?”

  “It was the most excruciating sensation I’ve ever experienced,” she wrote. “Defibrillation contracts every muscle, so your body leaps from the operating table. The constriction is so painful that it momentarily jars you from sedation and you awake, with a shock, in the middle of the air.”

  The memory of this image made Mitchell’s fingers shake, beating erratic rhythms into Nybuster’s conference table like a frustrated drummer. He squeezed the rim of his chair.

  But Nybuster hadn’t noticed. His face was a portrait of abject boredom, a child forced to sit with a tutor while his friends play at recess. He had finished the grapes and was now using the branches to pick the fruit out of his teeth. In the last ten minutes, as Charnoble had gone on about the state of China’s ballistic technology, Nybuster hadn’t once glanced in their direction. Finally he swung around in his seat, put his feet back on the ground, and turned to Charnoble.

  “Would you please arrive at your point?” he said. “I don’t understand how any of this is useful to Nybuster, Nybuster, and Greene. We’re comfortable with our client base, our risk exposure. Our firm has been in this business for more than four decades. Our formula has not let us down yet.”

  Charnoble glanced between Nybuster and Mitchell, his finger twisting in his palm. For all his reptilian maneuvering, his conniving ratiocination, he was obviously not adept at selling fear. The problem was that he didn’t truly believe it. Charnoble was right. He needed someone like Mitchell.

  Nybuster stood.

  “Sorry, chums. I’m going to have to ask you to tell the rest of your report to the tape recorder. I have business.” He started for the door. Charnoble’s widening eyes and whitish blond hair made him look like a scared little boy. Mitchell rose from his chair.

  “Mr. Nybuster.”

  Nybuster turned. He appeared surprised to learn that Mitchell could speak. In fact he appeared surprised to see that a third person was present in the room.

  “I’d like to tell you what’s going happen in about ten years, once Beijing attacks. Before the first missile lands in Times Square, Nybuster, Nybuster, and Greene will be ruined. And I don’t just mean the firm. I mean your private wealth, your legacy, your next of kin.”

  Nybuster squinted uncertainly.

  “Come again?”

  “It’s going to be ugly,” said Mitchell. In his mind he saw a body levitating above an operating table in a paroxysm of infinite agony. He allowed his fear to radiate out of his eyes. He would use the fear.

  “Go on.” Nybuster seemed, for the first time all meeting, to be listening. He scooted back to his seat. “I want to hear the ugly.”

  “OK,” said Mitchell. “Right. Well, for instance, China blockades Taiwan.” Mitchell hesitated, glancing at Charnoble. Charnoble was nodding eagerly, grateful.

  “China has threatened it before,” Mitchell continued. “It’s just a matter of time before it happens. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates that any act of aggression against Taiwan be considered a threat to the security of the United States and will trigger the use of military force.”

  Nybuster nodded, taking this in.

  “The U.S. sends missile carriers to the Taiwan Strait. China bombs Taipei. The U.S. bombs Beijing. China starts firing intercontinental ballistic missiles at San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Jin-class submarines surface off the Atlantic coast, launching warheads at Boston, Miami, Washington, D.C., and New York.”

  “Mm.”

  “Nybuster, Nybuster, and Greene’s employees will all have fled the city for the heartland, or Canada, or Mexico. Or they’ll have died. Either way, it’s irrelevant. The country as we know it will be gone. Where the major cities once stood, there will now be only radioactive wasteland. The economy as we know it will cease to exist, and every equity—except some of those listed on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges—will plunge close to zero. The dollar will be inflated beyond all possible utility, and those unlucky enough to survive the initial blast will be forced to employ a highly volatile bartering system, with water and food the most expensive commodities.”

  “Good God,” said Nybuster. “But you’re not exactly telling me anything new, are you? Or particularly useful. Listen, I’m out of time.”

  “But there’s a more likely scenario,” said Mitchell. He felt something powerful moving through him now, a dark energy. “China blockades Taiwan; the U.S. sends missile carriers to the Taiwan Strait. China threatens to bomb Taipei—but they don’t act. They’re not stupid. Sure, they’ve threatened a first-strike nuclear attack at the first sign of U.S. aggression, but they don’t want to bring on the apocalypse. Taiwan isn’t worth the loss of every major Chinese city, the massive destabilization of the yuan, the collapse of the economy.”

  “Right, but—”

  “Imagine, instead, a low-grade attack. Chinese sleeper agents are activated in every major U.S. city. Cyberattacks strain the electrical grid, checkerboarding it. Kidnappings, corruption, political murders begin to occur. Slowly at first, then more frequently. Why? No one knows. Policemen are assassinated by the dozen. Prominent journalists begin to vanish. The managing partner of your own firm is going out for his early-morning swim at his home on Long Island when a band of Chinese agents stun him with a taser and throw him into the back of an armored truck. Your managing partner wakes up in a dungeon, four levels below Canal Street, his wrists cinched to his ankles, an apple in his mouth.”

  “Are you aware,” said Nybuster, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice, “are you aware that the managing partner of Nybuster is my father?”

  “Certainly he didn’t mean to suggest,” said Charnoble, “in a manner of speaking—”

  “That will be fine,” said Nybuster. “Zukor, you have my attention. Please, continue. By all means—continue. What happens to my father in the dungeon? Begin with the part about the apple.”

  8.

  The pitiful little cardboard box containing Mitchell’s possessions from Fitzsimmons Sherman awaited him at the FutureWorld office, accompanied by a brown envelope imprinted with the familiar sketch of the canoe and the girl with X’s for eyes—the latest missive from the Maine hinterland. Elsa had enclosed an article from a scholarly journal, Current Biology, titled “The Fearless Wonder.” The subject of this study was a forty-four-year-old Iowa woman, Sarah Axon, who possessed a deformed amygdala—the almond-size mass of nuclei in the brain that controls the processing and recognition of fear. If the Brugada syndrome was a human worst-case scenario, Sarah Axon’s condition approached a human best-case scenario. When her amygdala was damaged by a childhood fever, she lost the ability to experience fear. But other than that she was unchanged. The study described how she handled snakes and tarantulas with glee, frolicked through haunted houses, and returned at night to a park where, just days earlier, a man had threatened to kill her. The aggressor, a “drugged-out” derelict, had stuck a knife to her throat, yelling, “I’m going to cut you, bitch!” To which Sarah Axon placidly responded, “If you’re going to kill me, you’re going to have to go through my God’s angels first.” The man with the knife ran away screaming.

  When asked why she would reach into the mouth of a snake that she knew to be poisonous, and caress, with unusual tenderness, its flicking tongue, Sarah explained that she had been overcome with “curiosity.” The word recurred frequently in the article. Sarah was curious to know what a haunted house monster’s face felt like, so she poked it (causing the person wearing the costume to recoil in fear). When she was asked what went through her head when she watched
horror movies, she replied, “I experience an overwhelming feeling of curiosity.”

  Fine—good story. But why would Elsa send it to him? She was like an alien who beamed into his office once or twice a week with bulletins from a planet in some distant solar system where the laws of gravity didn’t exist. Down was up, dark was light, and no one was afraid of anything. Elsa and Sarah Axon and the rest of their kind lived suspended in a permanent condition of hopeful, childlike, brainless bliss. Did they come from some highly evolved future, or were they refugees from a distant, primordial past? Logic would say the former: evolution ruled against the fearless. The dodo, the most trusting and friendly animal that mankind had ever encountered, was first identified in 1581. The bird was extinct less than a century later.

  On the final page Elsa had scrawled a comment in the white space at the end of the article. “I wonder if there’s a correlation between fear and curiosity,” she wrote. “More fear = less curiosity about the actual world?”

  Mitchell puzzled over this. Was Elsa chiding him? He doubted it—she was too generous, too uncalculating—but the question unnerved him. It was a question, after all, that Mitchell often put to himself. By focusing on the worst-case scenarios, did he cut himself off from the smaller, but more immediate problems? The personal crises, the mundane dramas and trials that had everything to do with daily life but nothing to do with the larger-scale crises? Was his whole fascination with worst-case scenarios in some way frivolous? A lark?

  A glance at his odds-of-death chart (death by earthquake, 1 in 153,597; death by air accident, 1 in 5,862; death by accidental poisoning, 1 in 139) was enough to call back the cold reality of the numbers. Worst-case scenarios did come to pass, after all, and if FutureWorld didn’t worry about them, who would? He was on the vanguard of a new industry—nightmare analysis—and he was proud of it too. He was a fear professional now, and he was being paid lucratively for the specialized skills he brought to the job.

  But there was more to it than that. Unlike Charnoble, he was not a cynic. Wouldn’t these consultations perform a valuable service for his clients, apart from indemnification? He would force them to look out the windows of their skyscrapers and see what was going on. Inside the glass towers it was the twenty-first century—fiber optics, silent supercomputers, temperature control to the tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. But just outside, where the thermostat was wildly out of control, it was still the Dark Ages: pantomiming prophets, barefoot beggars, plague and pestilence.

  “I know more about the actual world than most people,” he wrote to Elsa on FutureWorld stationery, his pen chiseling deep indentations into the page. It was impressive stationery—a significant improvement on Fitzsimmons Sherman’s thin-grade, laser-printed stock. The paper was a cotton and hardwood blend, with deckle edges, the open window logo embossed in magenta dye at the head and, in the center of the page, a faint “FW” watermark, visible only when you held it up to natural light. It said FW, but it communicated Brumley Sansome.

  “It’s curiosity that’s my problem,” Mitchell continued. “I wish I didn’t want to know the first thing about plate tectonics or nuclear war, but I do. So I learn more. And the more I learn, the more I find there is to fear.”

  In the following weeks, as July collapsed into August, letters began to arrive nearly every day. Neither of them waited for responses before sending a new one. So several dialogues were conducted simultaneously. But the conversation, in a certain sense, remained the same. They both had information that the other craved.

  Mitchell asked questions about Ticonderoga in the hope that Elsa would explain why she had decided to risk her life for the privilege of living on an isolated farm like an Okie homesteader. But she didn’t disclose her secret. Instead she sent news of solar tubes, bidirectional net meters, and metal flashings; lists of crops and the seasons in which they would be planted; and long-range plans—they were replacing the tennis courts with gardens, repairing the pump in the artesian well, insulating the administrative buildings for use during the winter months. It soon became clear that it wasn’t only a change of scenery she was after, or a desire to get closer to nature. No, Elsa had higher ambitions. She said she wanted to develop an entirely new way of living. “Rationality has made a mess of this world. Rationality isn’t helpful or useful, and it’s certainly not exciting. We want to trust our impulses more.” But what were those impulses? What were they telling her to do? Were they like the voices telling Marshall Applewhite that in order to ascend to the alien spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, he and his followers had to swallow applesauce spiked with phenobarbital?

  In his own letters Mitchell made a point of listing the virtues of metropolitan life, primarily the attractions of total convenience: the way the city handled essential services such as food and waste with optimal efficiency, leaving you with more time to do, well, whatever was important to you. He tried to introduce her to some basic econometric principles—Markov systems in particular—that might help her make decisions more logically, but he encountered resistence. It didn’t matter; his point was simple: they had urban farms in Brooklyn and rooftop gardens all over Manhattan, if that’s what she wanted. He didn’t mention that the most idyllic moments of his childhood were spent floating, carefree, in a canoe across Little Elkhart Lake, where for three summers he attended a wilderness camp for boys. (At the age of eleven he left that for the Young Scholars mathematics camp at the University of Chicago.) Nor did he mention New York’s doctors, the hospitals, the world-class cardiologists—but he figured he didn’t have to. Wasn’t it clear what they were talking about?

  This theme kept recurring, an undertow that threatened to tug them out to deeper waters. Elsa asked, for instance, why Mitchell kept plastic sandwich bags filled with cash hidden in his freezer.

  “In case ATMs stop working. Say there’s a massive blackout. Or a bomb. Or an electromagnetic pulse radiation. Awfulness can happen at any time. That’s what’s so awful.”

  These were the words they used, but what they were really after went unspoken. Mitchell wanted to know how she defeated, or ignored, the fear of a death that would likely come for her soon. And Elsa seemed eager to prove her case to him, to persuade him that she had figured out how best to survive a chaotic universe. But why? Why should she care what Mitchell—a financial consultant who plotted disaster and figured out how to profit from it—thought about her little utopian agricultural experiment?

  He was thinking about this in his gigantic empty office on the second floor of the Empire State Building. The newest letter from Elsa Bruner lay on his desk beside a report from the World Health Organization titled “Dengue and Hemorrhagic Fever: An Emerging Public Health Threat in the United States,” a file containing new telemetric readings of unusual growth activity in the Yellowstone caldera, and an article from Nature titled “Recent Contributions of Glaciers and Ice Caps to Sea Level Rise.” It was astonishing how much bad news was generated every day. You had only to pay attention—subscribe to the right newsletters and academic journals—and you could see the information accrete, like matter spiraling around a black hole.

  The newest letter from Elsa had little to it—she complained about the unusually pungent and penetrating heat that had smothered the Northeast all summer. The depth of the Housatonic River in Connecticut was at a thirty-year low, and there had been a pageant of spontaneous fires through central New Jersey, spreading from house to house, jumping over distances as long as a basketball court. The same signs, she wrote, were evident at Ticonderoga. The well was drying up; the fields were turning to dust; the evergreens were brown. But what struck Mitchell about Elsa’s note was a throwaway line right at the end, set off from the rest. She had written:

  “Is it odd that we read each other’s thoughts but never hear each other’s voices?”

  This had stuck with him, stuck in the folds of his brain like gum to the sole of a shoe. There was something here. He didn’t think she was proposing that they speak on the phone. That would
be difficult, since she had no phone line or Internet connection at Ticonderoga and she drove into Augusta no more than once a week. But the intimacy of that line (we read each other’s thoughts) forced him again to wonder why she was writing him so enthusiastically. Was she merely lonesome? Bored? That didn’t seem right. She had endless work to do in the fields. And she had plenty of company—not just her boyfriend but the friends who bunked at the farm for weeks at a time, usually after their rock bands broke up.

  But who, besides Mitchell, was willing to suggest to her, however timidly, that she was putting her life in danger? Not her comrades on the farm. The boyfriend, as far as Mitchell could tell, was doting and subservient, committed to her plans. Elsa’s father was dead, and her mother, a retired social worker on disability, was absent, a burnout in Boulder. Nobody would question her but Mitchell.

  So maybe Elsa, deep down, didn’t want to hear his voice. The distance sanitized the conversation, gave it an academic quality—a correspondence course in self-denial. The strangely antiquated act of exchanging letters allowed them a phony sense of detachment. It would be considerably more difficult to have to respond to a live person, ready with spontaneous retorts. When you looked at it this way, her letter-writing mania began to make more sense. She wasn’t trying to persuade Mitchell Zukor that she was doing the right thing with her life. She was trying to persuade herself. She had asked whether excessive fear could insulate you from the actual world. Perhaps Mitchell’s letters were as much of the actual world as she could tolerate.

  * * *

  Almost immediately after the encounter with Nybuster, Charnoble ceded control of client meetings to Mitchell. It was clear the kid had a special talent for conceiving cataclysmic scenarios.

  “You’re like an exorcist in reverse,” Charnoble told him over the office intercom. Since their desks were at the far ends of their respective offices, Charnoble had to walk thirty-five feet to his door, step into the adjacent room, and then advance another thirty-five feet to Mitchell’s desk in order to have a face-to-face conversation. It became office policy to use the intercom instead, though Mitchell still jumped every time the reedy crackle of Charnoble’s voice disrupted the woolly silence of his vast empty chamber.